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MEMBER DIARY

Andrew Breitbart: The New Media’s Conservative Visionary

When William F. Buckley and his magazine National Review appeared on the political scene in the 1950s, it emerged against the cultural backdrop of entrenched New Deal liberalism, and a one-sided press. Indeed, post-WWII America was just beginning to get its bearings after the Great Depression, and liberal ideas were all it knew. Buckley’s publication served as a conduit for a fragmented and muffled conservative movement. By carefully assembling disparate writers and essayists, National Review streamlined what had previously been a diffuse constellation of ideas, principles, and temperaments; it separated the sensible and articulate from the wing-nut ideologues. In the creation of National Review, Buckley took a wrecking ball to a monolithic press and offered an alternative mode of political reason.

In the years to come, it will become undeniably clear that Andrew Breitbart was just as integral to the healthy evolution of conservatism.

In much the same way as National Review gave a voice to wandering thinkers like Russell Kirk and Whittaker Chambers, Andrew Breitbart’s Internet savvy has afforded a megaphone to a disembodied grassroots movement—the Tea Party. Most importantly, however, Breitbart has exposed the existing liberal media structure as being rigged and elitist. Although he has boldly made this claim for quite a while, all doubt was removed following the recent exposure of JournoList.

Through his book Hollywood, Interrupted and his site bighollywood.com, Breitbart lifts the veil on a film industry teeming with intolerance and spite for those who would dare to question its warped value system—he has provided a voice to those actors and actresses whose very livelihood is threatened with blacklisting, should they express an iota of conservative thinking.

Personally, I would venture to say that it was not until the ACORN scandal that the Left perceived Andrew Breitbart to be a problem. Why? It was because Breitbart took an organization which purported to speak out for the defenseless, and exposed it to be a political vehicle for fraud. You see, ACORN’s voting “activism” was integral to the electoral victory of one of its former attorneys in 2008, as well as many other Democrats over the years. Most of the elites probably assumed ACORN would be around to commit the same frauds in 2010. Fortunately for those of us who like fair elections, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe—with the critical outlet of Breitbart’s Internet savvy—exposed ACORN to be rotten from the inside.

Did he realize the bulls-eye he was painting on himself?

The running theme of Andrew Breitbart’s cultural presence seems to be twofold: 1) he helps to illuminate institutionalized prejudice and intolerance where it exists and 2) he aggressively speaks out on behalf of those who simply cannot curry favor with Keith Olbermann or fit into the ideological mold of the DNC (a.k.a., the defenseless).

True, Mr. Breitbart: MSNBC, the NAACP, and countless others are at your throat right now. It’s just that they’ve been desperate for the opportunity to seriously malign you for quite a while. After all, if the Left’s power structure is to persist, it cannot afford for someone like you to continue galvanizing Americans into a higher political awareness.